Here you have SharpBrains’ 30 most popular articles, ranked by the number of people who read each article in 2008. Thirteen Expert Contributors and staff members have written these articles for you, covering a wide range of brain health and fitness topics.

Please note that, since the first article already includes most of our most popular brain teasers, we have excluded teasers from the rest of the ranking.

1. Top 50 Brain Teasers and Games to Test your Brain- By Alvaro Fernandez It is always good to stimulate our minds and to learn a bit about how our brains work. Here you have a selection of the 50 Brain Teasers that people have enjoyed the most.

3.Why do You Turn Down the Radio When You’re Lost?- By Caroline Latham You’re driving through suburbia one evening looking for the street where you’re supposed to have dinner at a friend’s new house. You slow down to a crawl, turn down the radio, stop talking, and stare at every sign. Why is that? Neither the radio nor talking affects your vision. Or do they?

4.Brain Plasticity: How learning changes your brain- By Pascale Michelon You may have heard that the brain is plastic. As you know the brain is not made of plastic! Neuroplasticity or brain plasticity refers to the brain’s ability to CHANGE throughout life.

5.Top 10 Brain Training Future Trends- By Alvaro Fernandez In an emerging market like brain fitness training, it is difficult to make precise projections. But, we can observe a number of trends that executives, consumers, public policy makers, and the media should watch closely in the coming years, as brain fitness and training becomes mainstream, new tools appear, and an ecosystem grows around it.

9.Brain Training Games: Context, Trends, Questions- By Alvaro Fernandez This past Tuesday, the MIT Club of Northern California, the American Society on Aging, and SmartSilvers sponsored an event to explore the realities and myths of this growing field. Here is the summary.

10.Stress Management Workshop for International Women’s Day- By Alvaro Fernandez Global consulting company Accenture organized a series of events, and I was fortunate to lead a fun workshop on The Neuroscience of Stress and Stress Management in their San Francisco office, helping over 125 accomplished women (and a few men).

12.Stress and Neural Wreckage: Part of the Brain Plasticity Puzzle- By Gregory Kellet “My brain is…fried, toast, frazzled, burnt out.” How many times have you said or heard one version or another of these statements. Most of us think we are being figurative when we utter such phrases, but research shows that the biological consequences of sustained high levels of stress may have us being more accurate than we would like to think.

14.Cognitive and Emotional Development Through Play- By David Elkind Play is rapidly disappearing from our homes, our schools, and our neighborhoods. Decades of research has shown that play is crucial to physical, intellectual, and social-emotional development at all ages.

15.Judith Beck: Train Your Brain to Think Like a Thin Person- By Alvaro Fernandez Brain Fitness doesn’t require the use of expensive equipment. Your brain is enough. We were honored to interview Dr. Judith Beck on how cognitive techniques can be applied to develop a number of important mental skills. The latest application of these?. Losing weight.

16.Easy Steps to Improve Brain Health- By Caroline Latham We can summarize a lot of research by saying that there are four essential pillars to maintaining a healthy brain that functions better now and lasts longer. Those pillars are: 1) Physical Exercise, 2) Mental Exercise, 3) Good Nutrition, 4) Stress Management.

18.Improve Memory with Sleep, Practice, and Testing- By Bill Klemm There are whole markets (think crosswords, herbal supplements, drugs, brain fitness software) aimed at helping us improve our memory. Now, what is ¨memory¨? and how does the process of memory work?.

19.10 Brain Tips To Teach and Learn- By Laurie Bartels If you agree that our brains are designed for learning, then as educators it is incumbent upon us to be looking for ways to maximize the learning process for each of our students, as well as for ourselves.

20.Cognitive Training and Brain Fitness: Interview with Dr. Elkhonon Goldberg- By Alvaro Fernandez Dr. Elkhonon Goldberg is a clinical professor of neurology at New York University School of Medicine. His areas of expertise include executive functions, memory, attention deficit disorder, dementia, traumatic brain injury. Dr. Goldberg was a student and close associate of the great neuropsychologist Alexander Luria.

21.Maximize the Cognitive Value of Your Mental Workout- By Schlomo Breznitz Like in the case of physical fitness, cognitive fitness requires deliberate exercising. The main reason for this rests on the fact that our brains are basically lazy. There are in principle two very different modes of activity that our brains engage in whenever faced with a problem.

23.Mindfulness Meditation for Adults & Teens with ADHD- By David Rabiner Although medication treatment is effective for many individuals with ADHD, including adolescents adults, there remains an understandable need to explore and develop interventions that can complement or even substitute for medication.

24.Can Intelligence Be Trained? Martin Buschkuehl shows how- By Alvaro Fernandez Dr. Martin Buschkuehl is one of the University of Michigan’s Cognitive Neuroimaging Lab researchers involved in a recent cognitive training study that received much media attention since it was published at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

26.Exercising the body is exercising the mind- By Adrian Preda One of the most important development in neuroscience was when the official dogma claiming that there was no neurogenesis (production of new brain cells) in the adult brain was toppled.

27.Brain Evolution and Why it is Meaningful Today to Improve Our Brain Health- By Larry McCleary You may feel overwhelmed by the stream of seemingly contradictory suggestions regarding the best way to maintain mental clarity as you age. Based on an analysis of seminal factors in the development of modern brain anatomy, I believe it is possible to make some very compelling recommendations for growing big brains, enhancing their function, and making them resistant to the aging process.

28.Physical Exercise and Brain Health- By Pascale Michelon What is the connection between physical and mental exercises? Do they have additive effects on brain health? Are they redundant? Let’s start by reviewing what we know about the effects of physical exercise on the brain.

29.Posit Science, Nintendo Brain Age, and Brain Training Topics- By Alvaro Fernandez The concept of having a “brain age” is, itself, profoundly unscientific. It is one thing to have that concept popularized by a game developer such as Nintendo through its popular Brain Age/ Training Series, and another one to have it reinforced by companies that are developing and marketing science-based applications.

30.Sleep, Tetris, Memory and the Brain- By Shannon Moffet Sleep is so obvious a physiologic need (from insects to mammals, all animals sleep) that it doesn’t even occur to most of us to wonder why we have to do it.